Shattered Humanity
by Zoegrace1
Summary: Why am I making this. The story focuses around Chelley/Wheatell, but it won't get anything worse than Disney. I spent 2 years planning this... And I am writing it. Why am I writing this.
1. Trapped

I'll say this, this is my first fanfic. It IS Portal, I guarantee it. However, you'll have to pay attention to the minor details to understand that it's Portal. Sorry that this exists. T_T'

I've thought for flipping 2 years planning this, and I hope it's good enough... I was stuck for the title... I eventually went with Shattered Humanity. Please note the story focuses around light Wheatell/Chelley, but it won't get sexual. THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT.

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**Chapter 1: Trapped**

The dull colours of reality faded from his sight, he tried to call for help, but he couldn't. It was as if there was cotton stuffed in his mouth that he couldn't spit out. And he knew, even if he could call out, no-one would care. He felt a small tingle, before the remaining colours were muted, and he could see nothing. His hearing disappeared too, replaced with a high pitched whine. The cold feeling that chilled his back suddenly melted, and he could feel nothing. The sickening smell of blood was suddenly interrupted.

All senses down, taste, feeling, sound, hearing, and sight.

He expected to stop thinking altogether, and so he mentally rambled on wistfully, in an attempt to keep his spirits up, although they had hit the bottom, like a rock, and this rock was too heavy to lift.

Several minutes passed, although he wasn't sure. It had felt like hours, but he knew it could have been seconds, minutes, hours, days, maybe even weeks.

This thought caused his emotion to go beyond the bottom, and buried itself.

When suddenly, he thought to himself.

"...Shouldn't I be dead by now?"

Light.

A dim light, slowly fading into vision. The high pitched whine in his ears stopped, and he felt control refilling his body, from the head down. His hearing was restored, and his vision focused.

With vision restored, he looked around, whipping his head around.

"Was that just me being unconscious?"

His surroundings were unfamiliar entirely, he was in an small, concrete, enclosed room with no windows, the ceiling was high, and there appeared to be a network of pipes just below the ceiling. Below the pipes was a yellow, stencil spray painted number, reading "2".

The light didn't appear to be coming from any light bulbs, when he noticed a grey, steel desk with a keyboard, a few buttons, and 5 monitors, the largest in the centre. The monitor in the centre was black, with green text saying, "STARTING SYSTEMS... PLEASE WAIT." The other monitors were displaying random statistics. He had no idea what they were for, or what.

He turned around, and noticed a wooden door, he crept towards it, and slowly turned the door knob, and opened it cauciously, worried, and peered in.

This room was again, without windows. Flourecent lights hung from the ceiling, turned on and illuminating the room with a warm, almost yellow light.

The room was filled with wooden, possibly mahogany bookshelves. Each of the shelves were filled with neatly shelved, worn leather bound books, covered in dust, and in dull reds, greens, and a few royal blues. At the back, there was an oversized arm chair, with a round side table next to it.

He walked in, and the wooden floor creaked under his feet, before flinching and stepping into the concrete room.

The situation was more than creepy, it was downright terrifying. The first thing he thought of, was to call for help. He took a deep breath, and yelled,

'HEEEEEEEEEEEEELP!"

He only had enough breath for that one word, before coughing and gasping for air again.

No-one.

He repeated the routine over and over, until tears flowed down his face, but he continued trying, slowly realizing no-one would ever come.


	2. Still Life

**Chapter 2: Life**

Time passed. He waited, often going into the mini-library to pass time, although he thought the content was dull. He couldn't understand any of it anyway, but on occasion, he would stumble across an illustration, a picture. It was always just a diagram of something, although they were in elaborate, and neon colours. Often one image would keep him fascinated for hours on end.

Another thing he found, is that he didn't feel tired, thirsty, or hungry. There weren't any clues to the time, so he could have been in there for only 20 minutes, or maybe even 20 years. The thought of being kept in this room permanently scared him, a thought at the back of his head which would keep him on edge. Although the computer...

At some point, while sitting on the concrete floor, in the dim room, staring at a diagram of something in fascinated silence, a flicker of the computer screen caught his eye, and he instinctively looked up.

The monitor had always said, "STARTING SYSTEMS... PLEASE WAIT" for what felt like forever. The monitor now read, "SYSTEMS READY. PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE"

Book forgotten, he scrabbled up onto his feet, and clumsily stepped towards the monitor, and read the text once more.

"SYSTEMS READY. PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE"

He looked down at the steel panel, and his fingers hovered over the keyboard, unsure what to press. He looked over the letters printed on the black squares, scanning the keys back and forth, searching for enter. He finally noticed it, and pressed it, feeling rather stupid for not noticing it.

The green text sunk below the black ink, obscuring it, before a new message came up, the man's "heart" beating faster.

The new text came up, it read,

"OUTER BOOT REQUIRED. PLEASE WAIT"

He didn't get frustrated, he continued staring at the monitor, as if someone, something was going to appear, flicker into life and give him instructions, anything.

It took a few seconds for the text to sink itself firmly into his mind, but when he realized what it meant, he started yelling.

"YOU STUPID MONITOR!"

He threw his fist into the monitor without thinking, to find it was rock-solid. It felt the same way as the concrete, and the same way everything felt.

Hard. Even the armchair in the library was rock solid, the book pages were too, yet they bended between his fingers when turning the pages.

He stumbled back, back hitting the concrete wall, and started crying.

The smaller monitors flickered to life, displaying white, before bringing up some useless statistics.

Through his tears, he walked slowly forwards to the desk once more, and identified the text as statistics. He read them, curious. He didn't know what any of them meant, to his grief.

Some of the stats included, "CEREBRAL DECAY PREVENTOR: ACTIVE", "MENTAL ROOM: ACTIVE", although most of the stats read "No information available.", such as "NUCLEAR COOLING: NO INFORMATION AVAILABLE". Although for the time being, what he was most interested in, was a calendar, and a clock.

"2:46 AM TUESDAY AUGUST 12 2010"

Everything was normal, but it was the year that was mildly disturbing.

"The last time I was out of this room was... 1976..." He confided to himself.

Yet he hadn't aged a day, eaten anything, slept, or had anything to drink. Just waiting.

It had felt like that amount of time, although his physical state...

He was only 14 when reality had faded from his eyes, cursed him and imprisoned him.

"That would mean... I'm..."

The thought shocked him, he still looked 14, yet he was truely 48...

At that moment, he decided.

Where ever he was, it wasn't any place with proper physics, or time, and the room could be the only part of the... dimension?

He swung around, and dropped onto the ground, and sat cross-legged, buried his head in his hands, and felt the hard water drip from his eyes freely. He had forgotten what it was called, but he knew that it was normal.

He heard a beep, and he whipped his head around out of his hands, to see that the text had changed.

"BOOT PERMISSION GAINED. STARTING..."

Before he could scramble to his feet, his vision was suddenly illiuminated with pure, white light. He was frozen in place, he couldn't see anything but white. He felt the ground simply melt away into nothing under his feet, to be replaced by a cold feeling.

The frozen feeling turned into a detached feeling. He could feel his arms, but he just... couldn't... lift... them... His arms and the rest of his body fled from his control.

He smelt for the first time in 40 years. A musty smell filled nis "nose", and he choked.

Finally, a minimal feeling of control faded back into him, but it felt like he wasn't controlling the same body.

He opened his eyes.


	3. Aperture Science

Reason why I'm uploading these so quickly - I've written some of it so far.

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**Chapter 3: Aperture Science**

He was in a dark room, with different coloured lights staring at him, blinking away, some sadly, most happily, or some had an absense of the blinking altogether.

His eye adjusted, searching and scanning his enviroment, he appeared to be seated on a bench. He wanted to walk, leave... See sunshine again...

He flexed a leg experimentally, to find nothing had occured, He blinked twice, before trying again. Still nothing.

He ran over his control over everything, what he could control freely. It was as if someone had re-arranged his mental control, and then removed it.

He shuddered, and heard a clank. He then noticed, finally, that on the bench in front, it seemed to be illuminated with a dim, blue glow. He looked around, still scanning his surroundings, and noticed the light followed where ever he looked.

Finally, some overhead lights came on, and lit the area. He could finally see where the lights were coming from. They were coming from metal spheres, with a round, black screen in the centre. They were all lined up on shelves, packed in tightly. They each appeared to have an optic of some kind on the screen, which was either relaxed, or darting around.

He looked around, and noticed there were many spheres next to him. They were more or less copying the rest of the spheres. He looked down at himself, and froze at the sight.

He was one of the many spheres.

He stayed silent in shock, staring down at himself, and checking everything. He began to shake violently, as a chatter uprose from the spheres.

He couldn't tell what they were saying, but they all appeared to be ranting about something.

_Space-ohwhat'sthat-justanotherdayontheassemblyline~hiwhatsyourname-hehehehdoyouwanttohearajoke_

He looked around at the mindless creatures, and thought to himself,

"I'm one of them..."

He started shaking more violently, but stayed silent, knowing his cries would be lost among the mad, mindless, yet dead uproar.

A robotic claw came down from the ceiling, and plucked a sphere from the shelf. The claw then reached into a hole in it's back, and pulled out an extension, before placing the extension on a rail hanging from the roof. The sphere would then trundle off somewhere.

One by one, they all went under the same process. He was one of the last.

On his rail, he followed the path that many of his new kind had taken, all ranting mindlessly. He wondered how many had fallen off the rail and smashed already.

On the rail, he left the room through a hole in the wall, into a larger room. The rail seemed to split into multiple paths, although most had been broken. He looked down, and the white, almost polystyrene floor seemed to be lazily carpeted with the spheres, still spazzing about and ranting. If he could cringe, he would.

He went back, nearly bumping into another mad sphere, and dashed off down one of the rails, going as fast as he could to escape the asylum. This track lead through a hole in the wall, and lead him into a corridor, it was pitch black except for his blue optic lighting the way. Now feeling somewhat safer, he began to creep through the corridor, glancing at the walls occasionally thinking he saw something move. It would usually be a spider of some description.

After a short time of travelling down the corridor in silence, the mad rambling of the other spheres disappeared from his hearing. He whispered to himself, not wanting to remind himself of the madness,

"What happened?"

He had seen a mirror of himself in the other spheres, except his small optic was blue. He wanted to cry, but he couldn't. Instead, a crying noise came out of a speaker somewhere in this body. Over his crying, he heard a sound, not like the dripping sound of water, or the chirp of a bug, but the sound of someone coming closer on the rail.

He flinched, before deciding they couldn't do anything, and waited. This sphere wasn't rambling, they were silent.

Finally, a turquoise glow caught his eye, shining on the ground, next to the blue light he was giving out.

He looked up, and noticed a sphere. It's optic was light blue lines pointing towards a black optic centre, and outside of that, a larger, and deeper colour ring with dark blue triangles on it.

"Are you sentient?" it asked with a feminine voice.

He tilted his head in confusion, he was sure he once knew what it meant, but no longer.

"Yes? Well, uh, I have feelings... And I'm feeling quite down about this, but someone is here who isn't insane, so that's..."

"Sentience?" the other sphere replied.

"...Sentience, yes... I guess?" he said.

The sphere gave out a simulated sigh, before whispering,

"Yeeeesss..."

He then asked it,

"You alright?"

The sphere looked up at him, and then said,

"My name is August. I'm one of the only spheres in this facility that survived the transfer with her memories, and sentience intact. Your name?"

He looked at August, desprately trying to remember his name, but it seemed to have buried itself deep in his memory.

"I don't remember, miss. Apologies." he said.

August looked sad, before replying,

"It's fine. Most of us didn't survive the transfer to... this... You're lucky to even be sentient and alive at all."

"There is, one thing I remember..." he offered.

August cheered up slightly, and with an excited tone, she asked,

"What do you remember? Tell me everything!" August squealed.

He brought his memories up to the surface without any trouble, and told her.

"I was 14 months old when they shipped me to a... facility... and I stayed there for a bit, and then... They killed me, I think? And then I spent 40 years in a room... and that was boring... And here I am now!"

August smiled, and said,

"That's nice, but what did you look like?"

He immediately remembered his appearance in the room.

"I was blonde? Oooh! I'm pretty sure my eyes were blue too."

August laughed, and then said,

"Short, I assume?"

"Short? Well..."

August stalled, and hummed.

"OH! Your name was Wheatley! That's it!" She chirped quickly.

"Wheatley?" Wheatley whispered; before squealing in excitement and swinging around on the rail as best as he could. August laughed, and smiled.

"I guess you might want to explore the place..." August said.

Wheatley stopped swinging abruptedly, and froze, remembering his desire to explore the place further.

"I guess, I'll go then." He said.

"You'll have to go the opposite way and head back to the intersection. Stupid one way rails."

The two rushed to the intersection, and Wheatley let August past, and she continued to follow a rail heading in the opposite direction.

The facilities insanity seemed to have died down completely, with the only sound being the occasional insect chirp, or something falling into a puddle.

Wheatley continued along the path, faster this time, not stopping to check his surroundings, but his eye focused on the rail above, making sure he had enough time to stop if it suddenly came to an end.

Wheatley, after progressing through the corridor for quite a bit, noticed it split off into a small room. He entered the room, and found that the rail went in a circle. It hung over a deep puddle, with moss growing at the sides. To his surprise, there was a core hanging there over the puddle, umoving.

Wheatley had assumed that all of the other cores had made some stupid mistake and died, but apparently this one had shut itself down.

Wheatley moved towards it slowly, and gave it a quick knock with his handle. The sphere immediately woke violently, and it threw it's handles everywhere, trying to defend itself from the "attacker".

Wheatley zipped back, and coiled away from the sphere of supposed insanity before him. It had three yellow rings as an optic, which rotated slowly, and grew and shifted with his thoughts.

The sphere opposite him stopped flailing, and peered at him, his expression. Every twitch. Wheatley gave out a hoarse, quiet squeaky sentence,

"You... You're making me feel rather... uncomfortable there..."

The sphere growled.

"My name is Ben... What is my name?"

"Uh. Ben... You just said it was, mate."

Ben's expression softened, and lifted a metal plate from underneath his optic to cover the bottom half of the screen, which created what Wheatley interpreted as a smile.

"You're sentient." Ben chirped out, almost sounding as if he was restraining a great excitement that would burst out of him any second.

"How'd you know that? I mean..."

"You- You have memory! Cores that aren't have no memory. They don't think. They don't feel anything. All they do is obsess. Obsess over the singular thing that has been programmed into their tiny, stupid hard drive."

Wheatley readied another clip to play through his speaker, when Ben continued to talk.

"We're all part of an experiment... I don't know what, but they killed us all and turned us into... these."

Ben's brief explanation brought a thought to what remained of Wheatley's mind, taken directly from his human skull and shoved crudely into the sphere.

"August! Have you met her?"

"August? Oh, her. When I found her, she was utterly unconsolable, and ranting on about ice or something. I had to bring her out of her programmed shell... She told me about the experiment though."

Wheatley and Ben continued to talk for a while, neither of them with anywhere to go except wander aimlessly around the facility, reassuring themselves and talking to themselves.

Eventually, the dark of the facility faded to an even deeper darkness, lit dimly by the two optics, casting juddering multicoloured shadows which did not fit the atmosphere at all, talking in mechacholy tones about their state.


	4. Light

One day, my R key broke for no reason. And that sucked. Don't expect too many frequent updates, I can't write all that fast...

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Time passed, rotting the white washed walls and rusting the metal pick-pocketed catwalks. The constant whirr of the enviroment fell into silence, slowly stopping the whirr of the production lines and the howl of the transport pipes. Finally, the facility stopped breathing, leaving the small machines to dwell inside, trapped and frozen in time. They watched the world age, creatures being born and dying. Hundreds of generations of birds were born before their eyes.

Although, despite all this...

They were bored.

They may have had no restrictive programming, although their bodies had been torn and mutilated beyond return, leaving nothing of their original form they wished for so much, apart from their brains, and that was doomed to rot away, the hardware to preserve the system for eternity was failing, as life times passed, creatures evolved and changed, many would consider an eternity had passed.

No way out of their over-sized prison. A human would have escaped within a week, with nothing more than a twisted ankle at least. But human they were no longer. Bound to the rails of the facility, but there was no rail up. Up to the surface.

August, Wheatley and Ben were the names that would pass through time, unchanging.

They kept themselves vaguely entertained with their own creativity, as lacking as it was, it would keep them from throwing themselves off the rail and to certain, and intended death.

That, and the thoughts.

The singular thought that would remain, filed next to the epic tales that they had told amongst themselves.

The idea that they would be found, by a human. Somehow, a human would discover the dirtied and grimy metal shells they had been so painfully reduced to, and return them to the surface, where they all felt they belonged. Underneath the sun, and not underneath kilometres of dirt.

Ben swung from his rail, gazing up at the newly discovered sight. A sight that had not been viewed by any sphere before. Hypnotized by the untold beauty. Something that had been present only in their tales.

"Wheatley! August! I- I found THIS!" He called, briefly returning to reality from the trance, before delving deeper into the beauty of the basic, yet emotionally moving... energy before him.

Wheatley slid across the rail, lazily, and somewhat uninterested in what Ben could have to show him.

Ben glanced back at Wheatley, behind him, before returning his yellow-eyed gaze to the orange light. He simply gestured to the orange sight that had him held in the trance, with a quick flick of a rusted, thin handle.

Wheatley flicked his gaze to the sight.

It was on the wall, a long orange rectangle that illuminated the room with a dim orange glow. It was the colour of fresh orange paint, and brighter than the two had ever seen. Even more so, it seemed to be coming from a opening in the roof, the orange colour shining in from above.

Wheatley, not saying a word, pushed Ben and looked to see where this orange rectangle was coming from, and why. He tried to look into it's source, but his vision whited out upon seeing it. He could not see where it was coming from. In surprise, he jerked back, his optic small and a paler shade of blue, it darted everywhere until his vision was restored once more.

"What is that?" Wheatley asked, rather confused, yet held from complete panic from a growing sensation of wonder.

"Light." Ben replied in a mumble, too detached to give a better explanation or term.

The light on the wall dimmed to a deep orange, before disappearing entirely.

Wheatley let the different parts of his body hang down in disappointment, and the upper plate above his optic fell down, obscuring the top half of his optic.

Ben glanced at Wheatley, noticing his expression.

"It comes back! Don't worry!"

Wheatley seemed to cheer up slightly, lifting the upper plate so it no longer covered his optic, and pulled the hanging pieces of his body back into their neutral position.

The yellow-eyed sphere stared at the spot where the light had once coated, before asking Wheatley to move to the nearest intersection, so he could head to another area.

Wheatley returned to the small ruined room, where he had seen the thing that he had only spoken of in the tales, but now had seen with his own optic.

He stared at the spot, expecting the light to suddenly pop into existence. He continued to stare at the spot for a full 6 hours, his thoughts moving slowly, locked onto the single thought of the light returning.

A new thought popped into his mind, disrupting the endless rhythm of "It will return".

"What if it doesn't come back?"

The thought gave him a sudden chill, he wanted to see the light once again.

A few seconds later, on a different part of the wall, a dim orange rectangle appeared on the wall, growing steadily brighter.

Wheatley turned to face it, in a trance.

The dream that he had treasured, of travelling to the surface began to grow, faster and faster until the idea had consumed every other thought, leaving no room for anything else.

Zoning out, he began to fantasize about the surface, light, humans…

He remained there until the light turned from the colour of orange juice, to pale yellow, returning to orange, and then fading.

He finally snapped himself out of his mind's vacuum, and had a small revelation.

He wanted to go to the surface. He didn't belong down in the dark, cramped, yet expansive halls of Aperture, gasping for air.

He felt he belonged in the light, walking and running on two sturdy, human legs. Doing everything a normal human would do.

With a childish laugh, he rushed out of the room, overtaken by inspiration and will to travel to the surface.


End file.
